To get a decent hearing, losers need to be wrong but romantic; in a word, Cavaliers. Otherwise, history scurries on past them, to keep up with the victory parade, usually, pace WH Auden, not stopping to say Alas. Few losers have received such a thumping as the loyalists in the American Revolution. They were reviled as traitors while they were still the enemy, then despised after they had been defeated and fled to Canada or England; then quite soon it was forgotten they had ever existed. From obloquy to oblivion, in roughly a generation.
No single loyalist was spat on with such venom as Thomas Hutchinson, lieutenant governor and then governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay from 1758 to 1774. By the American rebels he was more loathed than Lord North or even George III. As a struggling young lawyer, John Adams, later second president of the US, poured buckets of vitriol on Hutchinson and his “very ambitious and avaricious disposition”: “the liberties of this country had more to fear from [him]… than from any other man, nay than from all other men in the world”. Adams’s passionate loathing came to be widely shared. When Hutchinson died in 1780, a broken man exiled in England and shattered by the deaths of his beloved wife and daughter, he was top of the official list of “conspirators against the liberties of the people, barred from ever returning to Massachusetts and all his property confiscated”.
Coming up to the 200th anniversary of the Republic, its foremost historian, Bernard Bailyn, conceived that it was time “to convey something of the experience of the losers in the American Revolution”. And who better to focus on than Hutchinson, the loser of losers? This remarkable biography, acute, warm and just, was the result in 1974. Now, on the 250th anniversary, Harvard, the alma mater of both Bailyn and Hutchinson, has nimbly republished it, with a lively introduction by Maya Jasanoff, the Coolidge professor of American history there. The book reads if anything better today, but with a rather bitter aftertaste.
We start appropriately enough in Harvard Yard. It was there at the age of 12 that Thomas, the fourth of 12 children in a long-established family of Boston merchants, was sent to begin his studies. And he began as he meant to carry on. “All the time he was at college,” he wrote of himself 50 years later, typically in the third person, “he kept a little paper journal and ledger, and entered in it every dinner, supper, breakfast and every article of expense, even of a shilling; which practice soon became pleasant, and he found it of great use all his life, as so exact a knowledge of his cash kept him from involvement, of which he would have been in danger.” From his early teens, he was a keen investor, and by the time he left Harvard, he had accumulated a tidy £400-£500. By then, he was fully formed in figure and character: tall, fair, almost painfully thin, rather stiff and humourless, dutiful but also kindly and well-meaning, despising religious fanatics such as his puritan forbears. He was, as Adams said, obsessively acquisitive, but then so were most of the Founding Fathers, Washington and Franklin being among the greediest of land speculators and moneygrubbers. He was also a dedicated upholder of the law, even when he disagreed with it. Which was to be his undoing.
At no time was he a willing or unquestioning tool of the British government. He had written to his friends in England denouncing the Stamp Act and all Britain’s subsequent blundering attempts to tax the colonies. Crown and parliament, Hutchinson asserted, had long ago conceded the colonies’ right to make their own laws; the colonies were not represented in the British parliament, they owed no debt to the parent country and England’s natural profit from them would far outweigh any tax yield.
These were precisely the arguments that the rebels themselves were advancing, and which eventually secured the repeal of the act. But nobody believed that Hutchinson had said such things, because, as chief justice, he was the poor blighter implementing it – and he went on enforcing the act after his brother justices had caved in. As a result, Hutchinson’s lovely mansion was destroyed by the worst mob yet seen in the colony, his cash stolen and his books trashed. He was not forgiven for upholding the law, and even less was he forgiven for writing in private letters that no amount of theorising or wishful thinking could change the necessity in America for “an abridgment of what is called English liberty”. That phrase was to haunt him after Benjamin Franklin in London got hold of the letters and circulated them to all and sundry, with the deliberate aim of destroying Hutchinson. In January 1774, Franklin was given a roasting before the Privy Council by Alexander Wedderburn, the solicitor-general. His conduct, he said, had been “seditious” and “malign”, and his petition that Hutchinson should be dismissed as governor should itself be dismissed, which it was.
To see how much life these ancient quarrels still have in them, we should note that to this day American historians retell this episode with Franklin as the hero, standing there noble and silent “in his plain suit of Manchester velvet”, under Wedderburn’s “torrent of lies, rancour, innuendo and mean-spirited misinformation”. In Bailyn’s re-retelling, though, we cannot help seeing Franklin’s manoeuvres as mischievous and inflammatory, at a moment when tempers were running high on both sides, after news of the Boston Tea Party had just reached London.
Nor did Hutchinson himself place all the blame on the rebels. On the contrary, he wrote again and again to his English friends, insisting that: “You have brought all this trouble upon yourselves and upon us by your imprudence. You never ought to have made any concessions from your own power over the colonies, and you ought not to have attempted an exertion of power which caused such a general dissatisfaction through the colonies. God only knows when the ill effects of this mistake will cease.”
And when he actually spoke to the milder ministers, such as the colonies secretary, Lord Dartmouth, they took little persuading that the best thing was to let parliament’s undoubted right to tax its dominions “be suspended and lie dormant”. Yet neither he nor Dartmouth could renounce the principle of parliament’s supreme authority. That was the immovable obstacle which Hutchinson fretted night and day over but could find no solution to, because there wasn’t one.
Bailyn makes it clear that Hutchinson was no wooden saint. He never stopped pursuing a quick buck. As the threats to destroy any fresh imports of tea grew more menacing, we find Hutchinson continuing to invest in the tea trade, and instructing his agent in his semi-secret, vowelless script (not very cryptic, surely) to fulfil the new orders but to use blank endorsements on the bills of lading, and not to inform his sons, who were also trading in tea.
But neither his secret dealings nor his public protestations saved a shred of his reputation – and 1776 was the final blow. We need to reread the Declaration of Independence in the light of this book to see how Hutchinson, as the embodiment of the government of Massachusetts, was as much its target as King George. Broken and ill as he was, when Hutchinson read the declaration in August 1776, the by now ex-governor exploded. He immediately composed what he called a “bagatelle” and sent it with protestations of humility to everyone he knew, including the King. Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia, in a Letter to a Noble Lord was published anonymously. Quite a few people in England liked it, including Lord North. Nobody in America much noticed it.
But Bailyn gives Hutchinson’s bagatelle a good airing:
The pamphlet itself, however, is far from humble. Its substantive section begins with a dismissal of the ringing prefatory paragraph of the declaration, but not because Hutchinson did not think it worth debating “in what sense all men are created equal, or how far life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may be said to be unalienable” (though he could not refrain from asking the delegates of the southern colonies “how their constituents justify the depriving more than an hundred thousand Africans of their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and in some degree to their lives, if these rights are so absolutely unalienable”). He did not discuss the opening peroration because it was based on a false premise, namely, that the colonies were “one distinct people and the kingdom another, connected by political bands”. Everything rested on that “hypothesis”, which was not, Hutchinson said, and never had been, true. Therefore the invocation of the principle of natural rights and the contract theory to justify the dissolution of this “political band” was irrelevant.
There then follows Hutchinson’s analysis of King George’s “long train of abuses and usurpations”, the bits of the declaration we tend not to read, many of which are aimed at Hutchinson rather than the King: for example, calling legislatures together at unusual and uncomfortable places “for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures” – a dig at Hutchinson’s removal of the Assembly from Boston to Cambridge, at the urging of Lord Hillsborough, the previous colonial secretary. Or, “Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us” – again, not Hutchinson’s idea, though he did make sure that the British regiments were tucked away to avoid provoking mass insurrection.
It’s not so much that all Hutchinson’s replies are convincing, rather that a certain melancholy falls over us as we follow the drift of his argument. There’s a lingering regret that intelligent men like Franklin, who had originally set out to save the British connection, should have finished up as its fiercest foes and pursued personal vendettas to destroy men like Hutchinson who had stuck to it. Could there not have been a “Canadian solution”, or was it only the harsh lesson of the humiliating defeat in America that taught the British establishment to acquiesce, more or less willingly, in constitutional self-government 70 years later? Or are we ultimately driven back to the old clerihew: “George the Third/Ought never to have occurred,/One can only wonder/At so grotesque a blunder.”
British blockheadishness originated, after all, with the chief blockhead. It was the King who persistently declared that “America must be a colony of England or be treated as an enemy”. There have been first-class biographies in defence of George III, notably those by John Brooke (1972) and Andrew Roberts (2021). But what startles the reader is when, quite unexpectedly, both Brooke and Roberts toy with the unvoiced great what-if. Roberts: “A world in which the American Revolution never took place could have been one in which a united British-American global empire would have been far too powerful for Kaiser Wilhelm II to threaten war in 1914, so no Bolshevik Revolution, no Adolf Hitler, no Cold War.” Brooke too plays with this scenario, then dismisses it as an impossibility. The UK has instead tried to avoid thinking about any alternative by consoling talk of a special relationship. But who burned the White House? Who mostly supported the South in the Civil War? Who tried to keep out of both world wars? Who scuppered Suez? Special perhaps, but not in a good way.
What makes the republication of The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson so piquant is that it describes the evolution of American exceptionalism at a moment when that exceptionalism, that uncomfortable oddness, has never been more palpable to us. There He is in the White House tapping out unending abuse against his enemies almost 24 hours a day. Reading Bailyn’s account of the frantic and fanatical abuse spewed non-stop against Hutchinson by Adams, Franklin and the crazy firecracker James J Otis Jr, and his equally fanatical sister, the historian-poet Mercy Otis Warren, one cannot help thinking there is nothing new here. And behind the patriotic rhetoric, always the clicking of the tills and the rustling of $100 bills.
Trump’s peculiarity – his isolationism, his solipsism, autism even – is certainly not un-American. That refusal to be bound by any ties of precedent, duty, law, let alone affection, doesn’t come to him out of nowhere. You can find echoes of it in George Washington’s “Farewell Address” of 1796: “Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence, the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government… The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible… Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course.” Or, if you prefer, take Walt Whitman’s injunction in his poem “To the States”: “Resist much, obey little”.
What is remarkable about the Trump presidency is not that it is so unpopular but that it retains such a solid base of support. Whatever the annoyances of grocery and fuel prices, he still seems to speak to and for a great number of Americans. And those who persist in standing in his way are still liable to meet the same fate as poor Thomas Hutchinson.
Ferdinand Mount’s most recent book is Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality (Bloomsbury Continuum)
The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson
Bernard Bailyn
Harvard University Press, 480pp, £23.95
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[Further reading: How to kill a university’s reputation]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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Subscribe here to commentSurely the republican mob has seized the day, leaving defenders of the faith to languish in disrepute. Such is the case for Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin, lone champion of Indigenous welfare in Canada long before the idea was even thought of, now vilified by the descendants of those he sought to save, spiritually and corporally.
Originally published in French in 1903, one year after Grandin’s death, Father Emile Jonquet’s biography offers an intimate, highly devotional account written by a contemporary peer. Now available in a modern English translation, it captures the era’s raw attitudes, religious zeal, and colonial assumptions as they were experienced.
Vital-Justin Grandin: His Missionary Life in the Canadian North-West is available now at your favourite online book retailer.
Also available in the UK.